For San Diego’s LGBTQ Community and Cops, an Ever-Evolving Relationship 20%
By Randy Dotinga27%
7/18/2026, 1:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Anecdotal, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 13.3% saturation with 228 hits. Analysis detected 2,023 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,711 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 34.5% and a BS Rank of 20% (14,231 of 17,611 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 80.80% of the article peer group.
It had been more than half a century since her eventful visit to a San Diego lesbian bar, but Jill McCall still remembered what happened when the cops came calling.
She went out with pals one day in 1966 to celebrate her new job at the headquarters of Pacific Southwest Airlines, and they landed at a joint called The Club (now The Casbah) near the airport.
“We’re there probably about an hour,” McCall recalled in a 2018 KPBS documentary .
“All of a sudden, the lights went on.
This man walked around and goes, ‘You, you, you, you!
Outside, you’re all being arrested.’
And they handcuffed us and put us into squad cars.
They took us to the old San Diego Police Department.”
Charged with lewd and lascivious activity, she said, “we were marched over and thrown in jail with all the drunks and the prostitutes.”
Only later were the women released after a judge threw out the charges.
“The next night,” she said, “we went back to the club.”
Now, you’re more likely to get hit on by a cop at a local gay bar than arrested by one.
In fact, San Diego police chiefs have marched in the annual Pride Parade for more than 30 years, and at least one transgender San Diego Police Department officer has transitioned with support from colleagues.
The relationship between San Diego’s LGBTQ community and local law enforcement still has its tense moments today, decades after things first began to thaw.
Still, local author and LGBT historian Lillian Faderman, who remembers the days of harassment, says the turnaround has been “miraculous.”
“I came out myself in the 1950s, and I know how we were outlaws, how we were persecuted,” she said.
“The official policy of the police was to make us suffer and make us feel like pariahs.
It’s been so incredible that law enforcement in the main big cities, including San Diego, has so reversed course.”
As this weekend’s Pride celebration approaches, here’s a look back at the ever-evolving history of the LGBTQ community and cops in San Diego.
Drinking, Dancing and Harassment
Bars and restaurants catering to the LGBTQ community began to pop up in San Diego around the time of World War II amid an influx of soldiers and sailors, creating such a presence that a 1952 book called “USA Confidential” warned that “the fairy fleet has landed.”
The police noticed – the city was home to nearly 30 gay bars by the 1970s — and they pounced.
Never mind that gay bars were technically legal in California as long as there wasn’t “illegal or immoral conduct.”
“They’d just choose a gay bar to drop in.
They’d harass everybody, round people up, and arrest them for doing nothing that was against the law,” said Scott Fulkerson, former executive director of San Diego Lesbian and Gay Men’s Community Center, now known as The Center.
One Hillcrest gay bar called The Loft, which still exists, even had a “ no touch ” rule that lasted into the 1980s.
As Faderman explained, “homosexuals – and that was the term – were considered criminals.
It wasn’t surprising that police felt it was their duty to raid gay bars.”
Restroom Stings and Public Shaming
A more dire threat came in the form of restroom stings.
In 1964, cops in Chula Vista monitored a downtown park restroom through a vent and arrested 29 men for alleged sexual activity.
All their names – including those of a teacher, a lifeguard chief, and a school board member – appeared in the Chula Vista Star-News.
The newspaper got flak but defended the decision to disclose the identities, and it covered the court proceedings closely.
While police had a legitimate interest in preventing sexual activity in restrooms, Faderman said, “the horror is the public shaming” of accused men.
As she explained, “it wasn’t just that they were arrested and fined.
The whole idea was to alert the community about who these people were so they were fired from their jobs.”
The Rise of Resistance
In 1974, San Diego Police launched a sting operation in a men’s restroom at May Company, a Mission Valley department store.
After peering through a vent, they arrested 22 men, including three teachers and two doctors, on felony and misdemeanor charges of perversion and lewdness.
The names promptly appeared in the San Diego Union, including that of an obstetrician who’d served as chairman of the state Republican Party.
The LGBTQ community rose in protest, picketing the department store and newspaper offices with signs that said “SDPD Watches While You Pee!”
and “I Prefer Gay Company to the May Company.”
Then-attorney Frederic Link and other lawyers persuaded a judge that a search warrant allowing the monitoring of the restroom was too broad.
Several men went free, but only after others had already pleaded guilty.
“You can’t use a peephole over people involved in some of the most intimate activities,” said Link, who later became a longtime Superior Court judge, in an interview with me in 2018.
“You’re not just involving people suspected of a crime.
It’s everyone in the community.”
Link added that “it was just an ugly thing.
San Diego was a very anti-gay town.”
Tolerance and Even Acceptance Set In
Local gay bar raids lasted into the late 1980s, but the rise of the gay rights movement and LGBTQ visibility led to change.
Fulkerson, the former executive director of the gay center, recalled a program at the SDPD Academy that sent cop trainees for “ride-alongs” at the center, AIDS organizations, and food providers.
These connections “really stopped” the raids, he said.
“When we were no longer these evil beings that they talked to each other about, there was just no reason to keep that up, and they didn’t.”
Leadership made a difference too.
While Police Chief Bill Kolender declared in 1979 that he didn’t think gay people would make “good officers,” he later evolved toward a more welcoming stance.
Later, Police Chief Bob Burgreen set gay-friendly policies in place, and in 1992 he was the first chief to appear in the Pride parade.
Around this time, Fulkerson accompanied a police enforcement team on a visit to the gay nightclub West Coast Production Company near the airport.
As they walked in, the officers told him, “‘we’re guests of the gay community when we’re here.
So if you have anything negative to say, wait until we leave and say it to us.’
I thought these guys knew I was gay, but they didn’t.”
A friend walked by to say hi to Fulkerson, and the officers quickly realized he was gay.
The cops, he said, “just cracked up” and later joined him for breakfast.
An Era of Anti-Gay Violence
The 1980s and 1990s brought progress but also anti-gay violence.
In December 1991, a 17-year-old boy named John Robert Wear, who was not gay, was stabbed to death while walking with friends to a Hillcrest coffeehouse by a man who spouted anti-gay slurs.
Others were also attacked.
The killer, described in a court report as a skinhead, was later arrested, convicted, and sentenced to 20 years to life.
He is not listed in state prison records, which means he has died or been released.
An angry meeting with police spawned a citizen patrol and better relations between cops and the community, the Los Angeles Times reported .
Earlier, in the 1970s and 1980s, at least 10 murders in Oceanside were attributed to “homosexual overtones,” a San Diego Reader article noted .
In a 1983 case, a Marine claimed he killed a gay man who made a pass at him.
The Marine initially got a shockingly low bail amount of just $5,000, and the Reader reported that some prosecutors “snickered” about the case.
The killer, only found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, was released in two years.
Marines were accused of murder in similar cases, including two who were convicted of killing a man during a mission to “roll a queer.”
Lingering Attitudes Against Gays…
By the 1990s, local lesbians and gay police officers began to come out of the closet.
In a high-profile case, a San Diego FBI agent won a lawsuit that accused the agency of firing him because he was gay.
The FBI’s policies changed as a result.
And in 2002, Bonnie Dumanis, an openly lesbian Republican, was elected district attorney.
But negative attitudes lingered.
Former Sheriff’s deputy Dave Myers, who came out in the late 1990s, recalled that someone scrawled a gay epithet on his locker.
He also felt that other officers were less willing to assist when he responded alone to burglar alarms.
“They always come by to check on you to make sure you’re all right.
It didn’t take long for those individuals not to show up,” said Myers, who unsuccessfully ran for sheriff in 2020.
He said nothing.
“I just kept my head down and did my job.”
And Lingering Attitudes Against Cops
Suspicion of cops within the LGBTQ community has also been a constant.
In 2020, when no Pride parade was held due to Covid-19 restrictions, the organizers banned law enforcement agencies from taking part in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
But when the in-person parade returned in 2022, uniformed officers were allowed to take part .
When I spoke to historian Faderman in 2021, she regretted the community’s hostility toward police participation, noting that those who agree to march aren’t the villains.
However, she said, “I know that each new generation has to do it for themselves.
The younger generation does not see through the same lens because they didn’t live through what I lived through.”
When we talked this week, Faderman focused on the progress that’s been made over the decades.
“I find it so incredible.
The police were terrible, and we worked to make them better, and they’re much better.”
Since 2021, Voice of San Diego has published annual stories about local LGBTQ history at Pride time .
Check our archives for articles about LGBTQ pioneers , San Diego gay life in mid-century , the vital role of queer restaurants , local LGBTQ historic sites , a historic fight over gay teachers , and the groundbreaking work of historian Faderman.
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